Goodbye to all that, Joan Didion.
Joan Didion on May 1, 1977 (Associated Press)
The end of December is always a strange time, made stranger by the pandemic. This year, it brought the passing of Joan Didion. I first read Didion in high school, when someone gave me a copy of The White Album. It might have been my mother. My mother had given me books of essays by women before—Nora Ephron’s Crazy’s Salad: Some Things About Women, and Ellen Goodman’s Close to Home—and it’s possible that she also gifted me The White Album, which starts with that wonderful line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
How many of us are telling, writing and reading stories in order to live? I’m guessing anyone reading this newsletter.
I loved Didion and before she lost her husband and daughter, wanted to be her. She was sharp, chic, tiny and gorgeous; she wrote beautifully about everything that startled and bothered her. Her essay, Goodbye to All That, is one of my favorites; she starts with the sentence, “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends.” We’re not at the beginning of the pandemic and haven’t seen the end. Let’s hash through this middle together.
On the end of December
I have always been grateful for it, even though it often feels as if a grey cloud settles upon those last two weeks. Some people are smart enough and lucky enough to head somewhere warm and sunny this time of year. I go to the movies and read too much. Years ago, I wrote about retail, tobacco and alcohol for Bloomberg Businessweek. The days leading up to Christmas were (obviously) the busiest and most important time for retailers. I spent hours on the phone asking store operators what was selling and what was bombing, and going to stores to chat with customers. Every year, on Christmas and for a day or two afterward, I wrote about how the stores had done. My editor at the time was a devout Catholic who had been educated by Jesuits in Boston. He took Christmas off but always called me to check in. He had once been an editor of The Official Preppy Handbook and had majored in classics at Harvard; he was a demanding taskmaster and one of the smartest and funniest people I knew. His wife was a reporter at a rival business publication so he had some sensitivity to what it was like to be a woman staying up late, working for and with men. He was not a big guy—he bought his suits in the boys’ department—but he taught me so much about writing (“get in and get out,” he used to say—in other words, keep it short) and in so many ways, was larger than life. I was both scared and delighted every time he walked in my office.
I didn’t have a family back then, didn’t celebrate Christmas and was grateful for the job. But that job also meant I never went away between Christmas and New Year’s. Instead I spent my down time going to movies and reading books. I have never really broken this habit.
In the last couple of weeks, my husband, two sons and I have seen Spider-Man: No Way Home (long but cute), The Tragedy of Macbeth (short but too long), West Side Story (long but solid), Licorice Pizza (long and quirky). Being the Ricardo’s (wonderful) and Red Rocket (unsettling and great). My older son and I also watched Hacks—a near perfect show about two women comedy writers.
I read Dara Horn’s essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present, which was depressing and riveting, and ended on a beautiful, poetic note; took a deep dive into Hayden Herrera’s Upper Bohemia (Cape Cod blue bloods practice piss-poor parenting skills, aka rich people behaving badly). I’m in the middle of Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water (bisexual, drug addicted college swimmer traces journey to becoming kick-ass writer) and thanks to my rabbi, Karen Perolman, who posted about the book on Instagram, just downloaded Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn.
Did I mention I’m a memoir junkie? I used to make myself finish one book before I downloaded another, but I have (mostly) given up sugar and (reluctantly) given up alcohol and tobacco, so if I spend too much money on books, at least I’m not spending it on other crap.
